Babstock - Methodist hatchet: poems

Methodist Hatchet Ken Babstock poems Copyright 2011 Ken Babstock All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Distribution of this electronic edition via the Internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal. Please do not participate in electronic piracy of copyrighted material; purchase only authorized electronic editions. We appreciate your support of the authors rights. 110 Spadina Avenue, Suite 801 Toronto, ON, M5V 2K4 Tel 416-363-4343 Fax 416-363-1017 www.houseofanansi.com LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION DATA Babstock, Ken, 1970 Methodist hatchet / Ken Babstock. Poems. Poems.

ISBN 978-1-77089-158-6 I. Title. PS8553.A245M48 2011 C811.54 C2010-906476-3 Library of Congress Control Number: 2010940726 Cover design: Bill Douglas Cover image: Lisa Stinner-Kun

We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund. Laura and Samuel The Decor Comes a time we all must aspire, no? Magazines declaring in big sans serif: Style , Interior , Form , and Chair . Ok, I invented Chair , but glossy spreads depicting outrageously beautiful rooms wherein one diminutive, three-legged, teak, mid-century stool with a triangular seat and nubby cloth upholstery of an unassuming meadow green might very well cost upwards of four grand. Those magazines.

To the right of the chair on the floor, a pile of stacked art books: Cindy Sherman, say, Brice Marden, Gerhard Richter a Max Frisch novella splayed on top like a stone bird on a plinth. I know, reading the spines, Ive entered into a kind of silent exchange with the what art director? Nothing now eases the buzzing suspicion Im being signalled to from across a great distance, as in semaphore, or prayer. Someone wearing a Tag Heuer watch swivelling behind a desk in New York, or London, wants very badly to trigger in me a visual of earned leisure in idealized surroundings. Surroundings that better describe how Id already long been picturing myself. It is not easy to write a familiar style as Hazlitt had it. Then who doesnt hate to see a load of band-boxes go along the street? Corian slab in the calibrated cubism of the kitchen, brushed nickel, much is re-stressed, salvaged hangar door, its blast shadow of early corporate logo, laminates blue-black is Reinhardt-deep, a Chiclet gleam.

Lucite ghost chair blocking a view of chalk petroglyphs. And isnt to picture oneself to mimic the distant highway grader, slugging off toward rural anomie, appearing not smaller but farther away , spitting at cattle, leaning into work, overtaken and honked at. Is this about style? I remember being warned ontology was ugly by a poet who then ordered the chowder. Grass tells a story of listening to Social Democrats and de-mobbed Wehrmacht scrap it out deep in a post-war mineshaft, headlamps casting flattened versions of their huddle up against gouged rock wall, or ascending cage panel, up toward sun-licked rubble, civic life utterly fucked, but somehow on the mend Thats a different magazine. My girlfriend and I went halves on a chair and sofa set. Mid-century, yes, but knock-offs.

Nubby green upholstery, though a green less meadow than that mineral-rich, polyethylenized turquoise the Inside Passage reflects seen from a ferry rail sailing south from Prince Rupert to Port Hardy. You can see straight through it to more of it. The chair became our older dogs day bed. Shed roll into a brindled donut, or flip and act the otter, her legs in air, head dangled as counterweight over the armrest. A month ago she chewed through the fabric, a hole you could slide an arm into. Slide an arm right through the surface of this picture, into whatever spatial realm lies behind the illusion of depth, to hold the hand of the person wanting so badly to be seen precisely as they feel themselves to be: launching, from over there, starched murmurs, mere vibrations of air, in hopes they can correct the distorted, over-adorned version they fear youve displaced them with.

And have you? Can you know, lost in the forest of what J. L. Austin dubbed medium-sized dry goods: the bang, the furniture the olufsson and clutter of the manifest image? Sea-Dog, Redbird, bottled schooner, bug husks. The disconnected current gauge was a gift, its needle stilled between Reverse clips and Start charge. Consult it and it shivers on a hash mark. As Marginalia in John Clares The Rural Muse I wasnt finished.

From as far back as I can recall having heard a voice in my skull Ive wanted to die, or change, or die changing. Hexagonal window, the moon penned in it, and a segmented swarm sucking up peonies. Heat off tar shingles in June as the blood in one arm blackened, thickened, went blearily toxic, I exited earth up an IV tube. The wall-mounted paper dispenser narrating nightmares of scale, sores fell from fingers get well petals and grew back puce. Slug of little light, the bedrail gleamed. Warmed yoghurt, a summons button and visual aphasia.

Now Ive no spit, no hospice and admit nothing, or, for long stretches, only what happened was all that ever could have happened. Reeds curtain where land abuts lake, if such limit exists, if ducks arent taken by pike mid-thought. Carolinian (Crosscut with Sound) Colander, canopy, colander. Contrivance of green light-spots were leoparded by. Wild grape ampersand. Joining land with how we see the land, walk softly over the mudded impress shod horses made earlier their dung looks fungal, very forest floor.

Mid-trunk, one or more twig buds whose cells continue to multiply but never differentiate. Atop a paper-bag groundcover, tympany of deer deciding gones best, patter of Delias feet. Burl Ives puns follow hard on the heels of calling Kentucky blue timothy, and timothy red fescue, and fescue not Kentucky blue, not panic grass, but some kind of wheat. None of it native and the six of us six pages of Murphy or Watt . Trail attendants made cordwood of the blowdown. If we had growths that big wed be televisually famous.

Its here the trail splits, loops back, past the Z of a fawns foreleg portending not much from the black mulch, to where squat cars are themselves slubs on the bolt of horseradish field trimmed with purple phlox. Theyd shave or slice those monstrous, boxed-ear excrescences to make Vermeer ... I mean, veneer. I was back on the light. Decorative veneer. Its so not quiet in here.

Autumn News from the Donkey Sanctuary Cargo has let down her hair a little and stopped pushing Pliny the Elder on the volunteer labour. During summer it was all Pliny the Elder , Pliny the Elder , Pliny the shed cease only for Scotch thistle, stale Cheerios, or to reflect flitty cabbage moths back at themselves from the wet river-stone of her good eye. Odin, as you already know, was birthed under the yew tree back in May, and has made friends with a crow who perches between his trumpet-lily ears like bad language hes not meant to hear. His mother Anu, the jennet with soft hooves from Killaloe, is healthy and never far from Loki or Odin. The perimeter fence, the ID chips like cysts with a function slipped under the skin, the trompe loeil plough and furrowed field, the unhcr feed bag and restricted visiting hours. These things done for stateless donkeys, mules, and hinnies done in love, in lieu of claims to purpose or rights are done with your generous help.